You – How Big Are You?

Before I begin with a fancy introduction or some captivating lines about humans, just try reflecting on the following numbers. You are made of 7 octillion atoms. 7,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 atoms. That is 7 followed by 27 zeros. There are one sextillion stars in the universe. That’s 1 followed by 21 zeros. Turns out, there are more atoms INSIDE you than there are stars in the observable universe. Feeling bigger, tiny human? We’re just getting started.

Thank you for stumbling upon How Big Are They and today… today, we are not talking about them. We are talking about you. How big are you? In fact, how big are, we, humans?

Every other day, there is an image on Facebook with an inspirational background saying that humans are made of stardust. You like the picture, probably you share it and then you move on. You’ve done this, haven’t you? Have you ever questioned it, though? I don’t think so. I never did before writing this either. Think about it. How much stardust are you really made of? It’s pretty simple to figure out.

Subtract the number of Helium and Hydrogen atoms from your body.

Turns out, there is no Helium in your body and about 4.7 octillion Hydrogen atoms.

Subtract these from all your atoms and it comes out to be around 30%.

More than 30% of you is stardust. How does it feel to know that you are made of more atoms than the number of stars AND one-third of you is actually stardust?

With all that star power, you must have a lot of energy too, shouldn’t you? Of course, you do. During the time you are awake, your brain produces enough energy to light up a small bulb. My brain too lit up a small bulb over my head and I came up with this post. What’s even more fascinating is that every single day, your heart produces enough energy to drive a truck for almost 32 kilometers or 20 miles. If only you could fit a human heart in the fuel tank. It might be slightly creepy but hey, saves money!

Speaking of money, no matter how broke you are, how would you feel if I tell you that you are worth millions? Well, according to the Environmental Protection Agency, the value of a human life is roughly $9.1 million. So if you’re ever involved in a sale, make sure you’re being sold for this price or more. You might not be able to spend it, though. What would get you some quick money is if you could sell yours or, preferably, someone else’s skeleton, heart, liver, and other parts. Why? Because a human kidney is worth around $150K while lungs are worth twice more at $300K. The skeleton is relatively cheap at just $7000 and the cornea is about $21000. But if you are actually comfortable in selling human organs, better sell the heart. A human heart sells for more than half a million dollars. So before you break someone’s heart, just remember how much you can sell it for instead. This is also slightly creepy.

So, body parts are worth quite some cash but how big are they, in terms of size? Can’t be huge, right? Well, if you stretched out all of the blood vessels inside a human body in a straight line, chances are that the person would die. Also, this straight line would be a whopping 160,000 kilometers or 100,000 miles long. That’s 4 times the circumference of Earth and exactly as much as that of Uranus! In fact, if you did something similar with your DNA, it would stretch to more than 10 billion miles. It would be enough to create a road from here to Pluto and back. This would also kill the person.

While being made of stardust and body worth millions is pretty nice, compared to the Earth, we are pretty small, aren’t we? In fact, our total mass is negligible compared to the planet we call our mother. We, humans, surely, can’t ever be as big as the Earth. Or maybe we can be? Maybe we can show the Earth who the boss really is. How do we do that? Turns out, we are already doing it. We have already cut down almost 20% of the Amazon Forests in just the last 40 years. We have successfully depleted our ozone layer and have destroyed a major chunk of coral reefs. If that’s not dominance then we have also killed more than 50% of wildlife in a fraction of our time on Earth. We have polluted rivers and air, land and even the outer space. In other words, we are already showing the entire universe just how big we really are!

Share this if you learned something new about your own self today. Leave a comment and tell me how you do your bit for the planet you call home. Maybe, just maybe it could encourage someone else too! Bookmark this and the next time you think you’re too small to make a change, read this again. I hope you could see how big you are and how big we, humans, are.